Film Review: Once We Were Us 만약에 우리 後來的我們 (2025) - South Korea
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 8/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
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Two People Who Can't Find the Same Page - I have always said that movies are empathy machines. Kim Do-young's "Once We Were Us" works that machine overtime, grinding gears against each other until you feel every spark and every stall. This Korean remake of Rene Liu’s Chinese film “Us and Them" understands something the original only hinted at: that love doesn't always die from a bang. Sometimes it suffocates slowly under the weight of life and circumstances.
The film opens in black and white—not the artsy kind, but the drained, exhausted kind. Jeong-won (Moon Ga-young) walks through Seoul like a ghost haunting her own city. She has the career. She has the apartment. She has the hollow silence of someone who got everything she wanted except the one thing she needed. Then she sees Eun-ho (Koo Kyo-hwan) on the subway. The color rushes back in flashbacks so vivid they feel like wounds reopening.
Here is what makes this work: Koo Kyo-hwan, usually a performer who vibrates with oddball energy, dials himself down to a murmur. His Eun-ho is a man who loves with his whole chest but can't afford to show it—literally cannot afford it. The film is brutally honest about money, about how being young and broke in Seoul means choosing between groceries and hope. Moon Ga-young matches him beat for beat, her Jeong-won aging not in wrinkles but in the way her shoulders learn to carry disappointment.
The middle act drags. You'll watch them have the same fight about the same impossible future about three times too many. But then comes the sequence with Eun-ho's father (brilliantly played by Shin Jung-geun), and I dare you to keep your eyes dry. Kim Do-young shoots it like a death scene, because in some ways, it is.
"Once We Were Us" understands that growing up means growing apart, and that the saddest words in any language are not "I don't love you anymore," but "I love you, and it's still not enough." A beautiful, bruising experience. (Neo, 2026)